


the devil came back to georgia

by firstnameagent



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Bible Belt AU, Community College, Homophobia, M/M, Preacher's Son AU, Religion, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-10 23:17:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4411709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstnameagent/pseuds/firstnameagent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ramsey. The kid with the crooked smile, the razor-sharp gaze, the mouth too rough and too angry for a town like this. Ramsey. The one kid he’d never seen in Sunday school, never in the town’s only church even on Christmas and Easter. Ramsey. The kid he’d wanted, needed, to get to know even back then if only to understand a boy like him, who had left just as Ryan had thought they might have something in common. </p><p>“Oh yeah,” Ryan says, shrugging. “I remember him.”</p><p>-</p><p>(AU where Ryan is a good Christian boy with a God-fearing family trying to leave his small Georgia town and Geoff, the opposite of all previous descriptors but the last, has made his way back there at exactly the wrong time. Heavily inspired by Preacher's Son AU by ryanthepowerbottomguy on tumblr. E for later chapters.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everybody! If you're reading this, thanks a billion. I don't really know how long this will be but I have plans for a fairly extended thing (even though I get bored w/ slow build, so we'll see how that goes). <3
> 
> P.S. Northumberland, Georgia doesn't exist

Geoff Ramsey comes back to town on a Sunday.

Ryan finds out from Jack, who strolls into their Comp 101 class that Monday looking as tired as he always does, squeezes himself into the undersized desk next to Ryan’s, and says, “Hey, you hear that Ramsey kid moved back out here?”

“Ramsey?” Ryan repeats. The name is vaguely familiar, buried somewhere deep in his conscious, stuck behind a wall he can’t reach behind. 

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Kid we went to middle school with? Weird kid. Moved away before high school. Geoff, I think.”

And _oh_ , the memories burst forward like Jack has pulled the pin on a grenade. Ramsey. The kid with the crooked smile, the razor-sharp gaze, the mouth too rough and too angry for a town like this. Ramsey. The one kid he’d never seen in Sunday school, never in the town’s only church even on Christmas and Easter. Ramsey. The kid he’d wanted, needed, to get to know even back then if only to understand a boy like him, who had left just as Ryan had thought they might have something in common. 

“Oh yeah,” Ryan says, shrugging. “I remember him.”

*****

By the time Ryan gets in his car and starts backing out of the Northumberland Community College parking lot, his mind is struggling to catalog all the questions he wants answers to.

Where did Ramsey go the last five years? How did Jack know he was back; how did Jack remember who he was? Ramsey’s mother still lived here, he knew that much, but she wasn’t known for being sociable—unlikely Jack’s mother had talked to her about it, as much of a gossip as she was. Why was he back? Did he remember anything about middle school, anything about the town as it had been five years ago? Had anything changed about it in Ramsey’s eyes, even if it had stayed the same in Ryan’s?

He pulls into the driveway of his home. It’s nice, by most standards: two stories, picket fence, piano in the living room. Some people might think it’s disgustingly wholesome. Ryan kind of likes it that way.

“I’m home,” he calls out as the screen door slams behind him. He dumps his keys in a decorative bowl by the entryway. He hangs up his coat on a coat rack his grandfather used to own.

“Welcome back,” his mother replies from the kitchen. He makes his way over there, watching her stir a large pot of water. “Spaghetti,” she says as he walks in. “Are you eating with us?”

“Mhmm,” Ryan nods. He hovers by the counter, watching her like he used to when he was little. He feels a little silly like this sometimes: 18 year old kid who still lingers around the kitchen while his mom cooks dinner, comes home from college and expects her to ask how his day was. Jack, who owns an apartment some 25 minutes away, who’s hasn’t lived with his mother since the day he turned 18, clucks his tongue and tells Ryan he should move out sooner rather than later. Ryan’s not sure he agrees about that.

“Hey Mom,” Ryan begins slowly as his mind starts to involuntarily branch out from the starting point of _Jack_. “You remember the Ramsey family? Geoff Ramsey, kid my age?”

“Oh, yes, I heard about that,” she says, setting her spoon down. “One of Mrs. Ramsey’s friends mentioned. He moved back out here just the other day, didn’t he?”

“That’s what Jack said,” Ryan confirms, not sure why his head’s buzzing again at the knowledge that he might get to piece together more of it. Mysteries, town secrets—they were never his thing, not really, not with where they usually end up. “Just wondered if you knew anything about it. Why he was back, or anything.”

“Mm,” his mother hums. She tastes the spaghetti sauce with her thumb and makes a face. Ryan waits patiently while she lifts sugar out of the cabinet and liberally sprinkles it in. “She didn’t say exactly. But I believe he went to live with his father. Back when you were both—oh, what was it? Few years ago now. Perhaps he came back for school.”

“Could be,” Ryan nods, even though the nearest university is an hour’s drive away and to move back here to go there would be a questionable decision at best. “Yeah, I dunno. Just wondering.”

“Could find him and ask him yourself,” his mother suggests. “I’m sure he remembers you.”

Ryan bites down hard on the inside of his lip. He doesn’t say he very much doubts it, or that there’s a lot of things he hopes Ramsey won’t remember. Instead he makes what he hopes sounds like a vaguely affirming yet nonchalant hmmph noise.

“I’m sure he’d be happy to have some old friends back,” his mother continues. 

“We weren’t friends,” Ryan says a little too quickly. 

His mother either doesn’t notice or pretends not to—a well-practiced skill of hers, the inability to tell the difference between the two—and says, “Well, new friends, then.” 

He shrugs. “Yeah,” he admits. “Maybe.”

They talk about other things after that. About his mother’s day. How his classes are coming along. How her plants out back are doing. He appreciates this about still living at home—that he can walk in the door and unwind his day out in front of her. Not that he doesn’t have friends, and not that his mother is his most trusted confidant or anything, but it’s a nice level of trust and rapport to have with her. 

By the time his father comes home for dinner the table is already set and the spaghetti is plated out. They sit down at the table, his father says grace, they eat. It runs like clockwork, so it almost surprises Ryan that dinner makes it to the thirteen minute mark before his mother says, “Ryan says one of his old friends moved back into town the other day.”

Ryan bites down hard on his fork, feels the metal rattle through his teeth. His father twirls his pasta. “Oh?” he says. “Which one?”

“We weren’t friends,” Ryan says automatically. “Uh, Ramsey. Geoff Ramsey.”

“Bond, James Bond,” his father mocks in a deep voice, and Ryan lets himself laugh. “Hm. Don’t remember him.”

“He was alright,” Ryan says. “I didn’t know him very well.”

“You were asking about him,” his mother points out, and Ryan feels himself shifting over to Jack’s opinion on leaving the nest.

“Just curious,” Ryan says. “People don’t move back here a lot. Wondered what might compel someone to come back.” Which didn’t come out how he meant to say it but still carries more truth than he meant it to.

His father nods and shrugs. “It’s a nice town,” he says. “And his mother is Linda Ramsey, yeah? Maybe he missed his mother.” At that he elbows Ryan, who flashes a polite grin at his mother exactly on cue. His mother rolls her eyes, but with a smile.

“Anyway,” his dad says, “tell me about your day, Ry.”

And so dinner is as it always is: his father makes bad jokes, his mother laughs along, he smiles at the both of them. It’s another picturesque moment in life, something he’s grown accustomed to over the years. He doesn’t hate it, doesn’t rebel against it, but nevertheless he feels its weight sometimes. The knowledge that he doesn’t want to break out of it but that if he did he’s not sure he could.

When he’s done he goes to his room. He sits at his computer and considers typing Geoff Ramsey into Facebook. He does his Comp homework instead.

Ryan would’ve been perfectly content to take a gap year, go on one of those boating trips or cross-country hikes you could supposedly get scholarships for. Jack had been the one to convince him to go to community college. “I’ll be there too,” he’d said. “Knock out your gen eds. Guaranteed transfer in-state. C’mon, it’d be stupid not to.” 

Ryan wishes once in a while he could be stupid. But here he was, sitting next to Jack in Comp 101 and History 112 and Math 271, and half their high school class making their way through the next two years with him. 

The truth that he has not told Jack lest he break the large man’s even larger heart is that he has no intention of any guaranteed transfer in-state. He likes Boston. He likes New York. He likes Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Seattle. 

He has never been to any of them, but he likes them.

When he finally shuts down his computer to sleep his head isn’t buzzing anymore. He doesn’t feel any of the strange tension he felt all day every time he thought of the town’s new population. He doesn’t think any more about middle school, about eighth grade, about the summer between then and high school. He doesn’t let himself drown in it.

*****

Northumberland, Georgia is not a place people move to.

You live here because your grandfather lived here because his grandfather lived here. You live here because your mother volunteers at the church and your father runs his accountancy business from home. You live here because your roots go too deep to pull up, because the earth holds your family’s history as well as the trees, because peaches and peanuts don’t taste the same anywhere else.

You live here because you’re stuck.

Ryan had been so sure Ramsey had gotten away.


	2. Chapter 2

Georgia’s state motto is _Wisdom, Justice, Moderation._

Geoff’s never been very good at that last one. 

Not that Massachusetts’ had been much better; it was in Latin, the pretentious fucks. _Ense petit etc. etc.,_ some paragraph-long saying that nobody was about to hand out on a bumper sticker. Geoff’s always liked mottos, has always found something fascinating in the way people and places and things choose a handful of words to represent themselves—but it’s the handful part that’s key, and Massachusetts really cheated on that one.

But he’d learned it anyway, holed up in the Boston Public Library one day and bored. Looked it up in a book of state records instead of going to the computer because he’s a god damn romantic. _By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty._

And no, he’s not exactly sure what it means, but he likes the sound of _by the sword._

But he’s not in Boston. He doesn’t have a sword. He’s back here in the old Confederacy, south of the Mason-Dixie by more than a few hundred miles, well and truly living up to his fucking reputation as a Southerner. 

His mother—and practically everyone else he’s run into in the 72 hours he’s been back—had asked him whether it’s different than he remembered. It’s hard to explain that he barely remembered it at all; you only remember flashes of things when you were 12. Specific people and places, little carved-out chunks of memory. The character of a town isn’t something you absorb at that age. Or at least he thinks so, because it does feel different, somehow. It feels like he’s missed out on something. 

But that’s not a feeling he has the time to put into words, and especially not for the 200-year-olds who live in this town and have never been more than 50 miles outside it. It’s also not that important to him, that people understand how he feels about this. Or anything. Not people here, anyway.

His therapist back in Boston had called that _emotional unavailability_. He called it _practicality._

Practicality is how he approaches most of his interactions with his mother, too: she needs to know what she needs to know, and any more than that tends to lead them both down a path of at best misunderstandings and at worst flat out antagonism.   
It’s why he doesn’t combat her when she pretends he wants to be here—just shrugs and says, “Certainly a change of pace.”

She mentions it for the second time—the first time being their initial phone conversation outlining his moving back—over dinner on the second night. 

“Maybe this’ll be good for you,” his mother says, and he thinks this is just going to be another speech about the benefits of new scenery and coming back home, but then: “This is a nice town. Maybe you could meet someone here.”

Ah, yeah. There that is again.

Geoff doesn’t even bother to look up from his plate. “Still gay, Mom.”

( _Bi,_ pipes up that part of his brain that hates the way people assume shit like that, but it’s so much fucking easier this way, without her thinking he really does have a chance of settling down with some rural southern belle.)

He hears her fork clatter onto her plate in her surprise, smirks at the face he knows she’s making. “Geoffrey,” she says sternly. 

He picks up his head now, slides his eyes over her disapproving face. “I’m sorry, Ma,” he says. “I know, I know. It’s a huge disappointment for us all. I wish I could be the son you deserve.”

He manages to keep a straight face through the whole thing, which is an accomplishment, but the joke probably would’ve sold better if he’d stayed deadpan. Couldn’t help infusing a little sarcasm, though.

“Geoff, you know that’s not what I mean,” his mom says softly. 

He bites back the urge to say _Yes, it is,_ you _just don’t know that’s what you mean._ Instead he places his fork delicately onto his plate.

“That was a good dinner,” he says. “Thanks.”

He clears his place while she stares at him, that mixture of vague irritation and genuine sadness. It’s the same look she had when he got his first tattoo. Same look when he stepped off the plane with just a backpack in tow and said what, I sold the rest of it. Same look she has every time he does something to remind her he’s not the button-down-shirt small town boy she dreamed of raising when she grew up on these dirt roads. 

Sometimes he feels sorry for her. Sometimes not.

He goes to his room after dinner and that’s one thing he’s glad is the same. The walls are clear of all his sketches and other scraps of paper, but he’s sure they’re stuffed away somewhere in the closet or drawers. Tattered sketches of tattoos he wanted, song lyrics his friends had written for the band he swore they’d all start someday, essays and tests from school because God, he’d been a goody-two-shoes in middle school. 

His phone buzzes while he’s sorting through one of the drawers, and he cranes his neck to see the screen.

**Michael (1)**

He smirks and brings the phone to his lap.

 **[GROUP]**  
 **Michael:** yo Geoff how is it down in buttfuck nowhere  
 **Geoff:** hot as dicks, dude.

And when that takes a minute and a half to go through:

 **Geoff:** and the worlds shittiest wifi

He tries to imagine what Michael might be doing right now. Same time zone, so it’d be just past five. Probably just got out of class. He wishes sometimes he’d applied to BU when Michael told him to, followed the idiot there, but—that probably wouldn’t have worked out, all things considered.

His phone buzzes again.

 **Gavin:** oi you find anyone down there you fancy  
 **Michael:** you’ve lived in America for three fucking years dude  
 **Geoff:** yeah gav her name is my right god damn hand  
 **Gavin:** thought you were a lefty  
 **Geoff:** switch hitter  
 **Geoff:** ask Michael

He smirks as he sets his phone down. He can’t tell if he’s smiling at the thought of Gavin with his nose wrinkled up at the thought, at the knowledge of the equivalent smirk plastered across Michael’s face, or the memories of the two of them shoved into the back seats of cars and covered by blankets on basement couches. 

**Michael:** eh. he’s better with his mouth  
 **Gavin:** Christ alive you two

Geoff’s mid-laugh, about to type out a response, when his mother knocks on his door. He looks up from the floor as she sticks her head in.

“There are people at the door,” she says. “Welcoming us to the neighborhood. Well, you, I suppose. Come say hello.”

And oh, right, he’d forgotten how small towns work. How people gave a shit about that kind of thing. He’d never been able to figure out if he liked it or hated it—but in either case, here it was.

He follows his mother down the stairs and to the living room. There’s a nice little nuclear family set up in there—mom and dad, with a sundress and a button-down shirt respectively, and their kid, who must be Geoff’s age at least. Handsome, too: square jaw set in tension but long, thin fingers folded carefully in his lap. 

“Geoff, this is Mr. and Mrs. Haywood and their son, Ryan,” his mother says, gesturing for him to shake hands. He does, and smirks at the way Mrs. Haywood raises an eyebrow at his inked-up arms.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, and is greeted with agreements.

The kid—Ryan—looks up and Geoff is sure he recognizes him. They were at school together, must’ve been, but that doesn’t account for the blush in Ryan’s cheeks that he’s so valiantly trying to hide. Geoff doesn’t remember anything compromising happening between the two of them—and trust him, he’d know. 

“They brought us pie,” his mother says, gesturing to the blueberry pie on the table. It looks homemade; that’s one thing he can confidently say he likes about small towns.

“Thank you,” Geoff says, settling down on the couch. He sits across from the kid, watches his expression. To his credit, Ryan watches back. 

“The least we could do for new neighbors,” Mrs. Haywood says pleasantly.

“We live a half a mile up the road,” Ryan points out. Geoff catches himself laughing at the deadpan way he says it—it’s not to combat his mother, he just has the need to correct her. He knows that voice. Used to have it.

“Neighbors in the general sense,” his mother corrects. Ryan nods.

Geoff’s mother taps her fingers, that rhythm she gets into when she’s trying to find a new topic of conversation. “What are you doing these days?” she finally settles on, looking between the two adults. “It’s been a long while since I heard from either of you.”

“Oh, same old, same old,” Mr. Haywood offers in. “Still busy with helping out at the church, you know? A lot of business to be taken care of.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” his mother says, and Geoff fights not to roll his eyes. He can’t imagine the last time his mother set foot in that church. Can’t even remember the last time he did. He looks over at Ryan, but the kid’s just nodding along—and oh, God, he probably goes to church every damn Sunday. 

Small towns, he thinks again. Or maybe it’s just this one.

“So,” Mrs. Haywood chirps, flashing a smile. And like she’s read his mind: “What brings you back to Northumberland, Geoff?”

They hadn’t talked about what he was going to say to this, hadn’t wanted to even begin to broach that subject, so he hears his mom’s breath catch next to him, hears her start to formulate a response something along the lines of _Oh, a change of pace_ —and before she can finish he hears himself saying, “My dad died.”

All eyes on the room snapping stunned towards him, there’s a familiar feeling. He swallows and sets down his knife and looks up languidly. “I was living with my dad,” he says, “and he kicked it. So I’m back here.”

And the lady is already apologizing, heartfelt _oh, I am so sorry_ s, but he’s not looking at her. He’s looking at the boy staring right back at him, studying his face for pity and finding none of it, just sympathy and a thousand more questions.

He smiles. Ryan looks away. 

“It’s alright, Mrs. Haywood,” he says quickly before the poor woman has an aneurysm over it. “He was sick for a while. I had time to adjust. And I’m happy to be back in town with my mother.”

Three lies in three sentences. A nice hat trick. 

Mrs. Haywood apologizes again anyway, which he accepts again. He doesn’t bother looking over at his mother, knowing she’ll have that full-faced blush. He lets Mr. Haywood change the subject to something benign, smoothly drops back into the conversation, and is almost surprised at how easy it was to say after all. 

When they finally stand up to leave, Ryan Haywood still hasn’t said more than a few words in a row. He’s nodded along or shaken his head to the conversation, offering up a hum of agreement here and there, but mostly just looked like he couldn’t wait to get off that couch. 

Which is fine. He’s plenty interesting just to look at.

Geoff shakes everyone’s hands again as they go, because he can be god damn polite when he wants to be, and wishes them good luck and a good day. As they walk out he catches that sad look in Mrs. Haywood’s eyes again, and apparently his mother does too, because she’s on him as soon as the door’s shut behind them.

“Geoffrey,” she sighs. “Try to be a little less blunt next time.”

“About what?” he asks, tilting his head just-so. “My father’s death? I apologize, you’re right, should’ve had more tact.”

His mother sighs, not even taking the bait this time. Maybe too many times in one day. “You don’t have to be so antagonistic,” she says gently. “I’m trying to make this work for us. Can you try that as well?”

He can think of a dozen things to say to that, most of them falling neatly into the category of so antagonistic, but he bites them back at the look on her face. “I can try,” he admits. “No promises.”

“No promises,” his mother repeats, and it’s as close to an agreement as they’ve reached in a long time. 

He heads back up to his room and pulls his phone out of his back pocket as he goes.

 **Geoff:** fuck me, guys  
 **Geoff:** there might be someone hot in this shithole after all


End file.
